I. Mobile Phone Usage Patterns
Here, we tried to determine which mobile phone brands are popular amongst Indian consumers, which are their favorite apps, what they use their mobile phones for the most, and much more.
a. Mobile Brands Owned
In the past one year, we've seen a lot of new mobile phone brands emerge, which have caused a major reshuffle in the current ownership rankings. The top spot however, continues to remain with Nokia, which is owned by 60% of the respondents. In fact, this year, 60% of the respondents said that they owned a Nokia, as against 58% last year. The low cost brand, Micromax was also no where in the rankings in our last mobile usage survey, but it has climbed up to the seventh position this year, which is quite an achievement. LG's position has changed from seventh last time to eighth this time, but the percentage of users owning a LG mobile has doubled from 3% to 6%. HTC, Spice, and Fly mobile continue to retain similar ownership figures as last year. Apple, despite its popularity is only owned by 2% of our respondents.
The interesting thing to observe about the mobile ownership results is that the ownership percentages for the mobile phone brands that came up in our last year's survey hasn't changed this year. If Sony Ericsson was owned by 16% of the respondents last year, it's owned by 14% people this year. Likewise for other brands. But, other mobile phone brands have made a lot of noise and increased their respective market shares over one year.
This actually reflects the state of the mobile phone market, which despite getting overcrowded is not showing any signs of slowdown, because there are sufficient number of buyers around. We found that 51% of the users were mostly satisfied with their mobile phones, while another 29% were completely satisfied. So overall, 80% of the users don't have too many complaints with the mobile phones they own. Only about 6% of Nokia users were not so satisfied with their mobile phone.
b. What people do with their mobile phones?
Mobile phones have become so feature rich that making phone calls is just another function they provide. The basic applications that people use their mobile phones are the same as what we received last year. The biggest usage for mobile phones, besides making phone calls is sending/receiving SMS. This is followed by listening to music, taking pictures, and accessing the Internet. The rest of the usage apps can be seen in the graph.
Internet and Email access from the mobile have gone up significantly as compared to our last survey's results. While only 37% of the users accessed email from their mobile in our last survey, the figure stands at 49% this year. Likewise, 66% of the users said they accessed the Internet from their mobiles this year, as compared to 56% last year.
c. The most popular Mobile OS
Symbian continues to be the dominant OS for the mobile phones in India. However, the awareness levels among users about which OS is their mobile phones running is pretty low. That's why, 35% of the users didn't even answer this question, while 29% said Symbian, another 13% were running Windows, while 7% were on a Blackberry.
d. Favorite Mobile apps
The good news is that about 47% of the users download apps on their mobile phones, but the bad news is that another 32% didn't respond to this question, while another 20% responded in the negative. So, essentially, there are a good 52% of the people who probably don't download apps on their mobile phones. There could be many reasons for this, which we didn't get into this time. We did however, try and find out the most popular apps on mobile phones. 21% of the respondents use Gmail from their mobile phone, while another 19% have Opera web browser installed. Another 14% use Facebook from their mobile phone, while another 10% use Google Maps. Plus, there are small pockets of people who use Twitter, Snaptu, Nimbuzz, Fring, etc on their mobile phone.